LinkedIn for Lawyers

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Yesterday, we went through the basics of setting up an account and profile on LinkedIn.  Today, we’re going to look much more in-depth at the LinkedIn profile and get ourselves to 100% profile completeness (or just about)!

You may be wondering why you need to bother with completing your profile – isn’t the bare minimum enough?

Well, according to LinkedIn, "Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn."  Your profile becomes complete when you have:

  • Your current position
  • Two past positions
  • Your education
  • Your profile summary
  • A profile photo
  • Your specialties
  • At least three recommendations

Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – How to Set up a Profile Part II

Here on Zen, I talk a lot about why I love social media, and how I think it can be useful to lawyers and law firms.  Now that I’ve got you all convinced, I realize that not everyone knows how or where to start.  I’ve talked about some of the basic principles of using these tools – engage, don’t broadcast; give yourself a small window of time to use them each day, etc – but not the how-to of using them.  So I’m going to be doing a series of social media tutorials over the next several weeks to get you started, and I’m beginning with LinkedIn.

To me, LinkedIn is the most useful social media platform for lawyers, if for no other reason than it’s considered the most professional.  Because of that, most of your clients will be there, so you should be too.  

Here’s a quick note – there is a LOT of information in this post, but don’t be alarmed. It will take you less time to complete your profile than it will to read through this post!

Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – How to Set up a Profile Part I

I’ve spent the last two days talking about how to make improvements to your LinkedIn profile, and getting the most out of your LinkedIn home page.  Today, I want to cover LinkedIn Groups.

On LinkedIn, there are groups for everything, from business networking to animal lovers.  Groups are an excellent way to connect with people outside of your immediate network in areas where you share an interest.

I’m going to focus on the ILN’s group, because I’m the moderator and have the most familiarity with it, but most of this advice can be applicable to any business networking group for lawyers. During my presentation, I started with the "why" – why should the lawyers in the room have any interest in joining the ILN Group on LinkedIn? Continue Reading LinkedIn – Making the Most out of Groups

Yesterday, I talked about what improvements you  might want to make to your LinkedIn profile to get the best results from it.  Today, I’ll talk about the home page screen and why it’s useful to be logging in to LinkedIn periodically – I have LinkedIn set to open as one of the tabs on my browser, so every morning, I open Outlook and Chrome, go through my emails, and check on my browser tabs.  This includes taking a quick look (no more than five minutes) at my LinkedIn home page screen.  Lawyers, I know you’re busy, but if you make this part of your morning routine, you’ll only have to spend a few minutes looking at LinkedIn, you’ll stay up to date on what your network is doing, and you won’t have to try to remember to visit LinkedIn.

There are four things I find of particular importance on your home page screen (which looks like this):

Continue Reading “Hitting the (Other) Links to Develop Your Rainmaking Game – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LinkedIn” – Part II

If you read my posts regularly, you’ll know that I have a passion for social media.  I don’t think it’s the be all and end all of business development tools, of course, but I do have a fondness for it and an interest in sharing that fondness with my attorneys.

So I jumped at the chance to present a more in-depth look at LinkedIn to our group at the 2011 23rd ILN Annual Meeting on Saturday morning.  I wanted to stick to what I thought were the most relevant points about LinkedIn, and what would give our attorneys the greatest impact – and for me, there was no greater joy than sitting with one of our attorneys during the subsequent breakout session and helping him fill out his profile, as he repeated back to me snippets of what I’d said. 

Last week, I mentioned a few best practices for LinkedIn, but I’d like to add in a bit more about our session in Lisbon.

Continue Reading “Hitting the (Other) Links to Develop Your Rainmaking Game – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LinkedIn”

I’m just back from our 2011 23rd Annual Meeting in Lisbon, and I’ll have lots to share with you over the next week or so.  But what’s fresh in my mind this morning is our session on LinkedIn from Saturday morning – I’d like to share some best practices for LinkedIn, which can be particularly useful when you’re just returning from any conference:

  • Review the attendee list, or the stack of business cards you returned with and make note of the people you met and chatted to at the conference. Search for, and connect to, these people on LinkedIn, making sure to send a personal note with your invitation that refers to your conversations.
     
  • Set your browser to open to the LinkedIn home page when you start it up.  I use Chrome on my desktop, and have set it to open several tabs when I start it up each morning, including LinkedIn – that way I never have to remember to visit LinkedIn and check the latest status updates.  Then, each morning, I scroll through my news feed and comment on or like updates and news, or connect to anyone I might know.  It doesn’t take a lot of time, and it keeps me plugged into what my network is doing.

Continue Reading LinkedIn Best Practices

On Wednesday, December 8th, the ILN offered a webinar with Freesource’s Nathan Egan on "LinkedIn for Lawyers." Because of all the great information in the webinar, I have broken this up into a few posts, with Part I and Part II being published last week.

If You Build it, They Will Come

Nathan said that one of the common objections for lawyers using LinkedIn is that they’re too busy to do any of this, let alone "build a network."  But he assured the audience that they already have a network, built over their careers. They don’t need to build a new network on LinkedIn, just capture the existing network.

He said that LinkedIn does their best to automate this process, allowing users to upload their contacts from an email program. Users can have very few connections and in as little as an hour, send out 100 meaningful connection requests to their network. In the next day or so, those people will connect with you and you’ll have a nice network.

Nathan said that once users have built the network of people they know, continuing to develop it becomes a case of management over time. It should integrate with your work flow, if you’ve set LinkedIn as your home page, and as you see new connection opportunities, you can pick them off one at a time.Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: LinkedIn for Lawyers with Nathan Egan Part III

On Wednesday, December 8h, the ILN offered a webinar with Freesource’s Nathan Egan on "LinkedIn for Lawyers." Because of all the great information in the webinar, I’m breaking this up into a couple of posts, with Part I being published yesterday.

Now let’s jump right into Part II

Your External Profile – A Brand Beacon

Nathan then took the audience through an individual LinkedIn profile, saying that it can be a beacon for your brand.  He said that in social media, we talk a lot about "inbound marketing" – creating the context for people to come to you – and the profile is really where it all starts in terms of positioning.

Most firms have put lots of money into their corporate websites, which are the umbrella marketing portal for the firm.  Nathan said that they’re looking to help people understand that the LinkedIn profile, the social assets of the firm (which are the people), are now sub-domains of the corporate website.

They have the potential to drive search engine optimization activity back to the corporate website.  Nathan said that by hard linking and key wording the profile in a meaningful way, with the keywords that the firm would want to be found for, they create a tremendous lift in their marketing efforts very naturally and passively.

Nathan said that the idea is to make LinkedIn work for the attorneys in a way that doesn’t take a lot of time. It does involve some upfront work to get it going, but he said the investment is well worth it.  Once the profile is up, running and polished, it becomes a passive part of your professional world.Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: LinkedIn for Lawyers with Nathan Egan Part II

The ILN has offered a webinar series to our members for the past two years, and in 2010, we’re offering a three-part series on social networking.  In October, we started with, "Social Networking Strategy & Blogging," with Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog.  December’s webinar with Freesource’s Nathan Egan focused on "LinkedIn for Lawyers."  

There’s a lot of great information in here from Nathan, so I’ll break this up into a couple of posts.

After a short introduction from ILN’s Executive Director, Alan Griffiths, Nathan jumped into his presentation.  Due to some technical difficulties, Nathan wasn’t able to share his PowerPoint, but instead offered a fabulous demonstration of the most useful features of LinkedIn and how attorneys can make it work for them.

He started by saying that the ILN had informally interviewed a few of the attorneys before the webinar, and learned that their business objectives for 2011 centered around finding new clients, having better access to & visibility in the marketplace, being able to collaborate and share, and positioning the firm and its lawyers to be top of mind for clients.  Nathan said that these new tools, like LinkedIn, offer a way to help meet these business objectives.Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: LinkedIn for Lawyers with Nathan Egan Part I